🌬️🎁The Gift
Îmi vine să și râd cum m-am gândit eu că îmi va fi mai ușor să conving oameni pe care nu îi cunosc să facă ce făceam eu de amorul artei. Nu, nu este mai ușor, e mai greu. Dacă înainte îmi era greu să vin cu ceva interesant în fiecare săptămână (plus să și găsesc timpul să scriu), acum trebuie să fac lucrul ăsta în paralel cu conceput set de întrebări personalizate și ținut corespondența de convingere.
Ceea ce îmi aduce aminte de una din poveștile la care mă gândesc des - A Squash and a Squeeze - cu femeia care se vaită că nu are loc în casă și preotul o sfătuiește să își ia și o găină, și o capră, și un porc, și o vacă, după care o lasă să le dea drumul și așa descoperă femeia ce mult spațiu avea în casă.
Deci tot eu la aparate, cu și mai puțin timp ca de obicei. Așa că voi intra în cufărul de urgență, și voi cita o altă poveste populară la care mă gândesc des, redescoperită în interpretarea lui Lewis Hyde din volumul The Gift.
Se fac 2 ani de când citesc cu pixul, rigla și highlighterul în mână The Gift. Cartea asta e ca un tort Krantz. Densă și plină de esențe. Până la ea mă descurcam să citesc doar cu pixul și telefonul. La ea am avut nevoie și de riglă, și, mai nou, și de un highlighter. A dat peste cap toate standardele după care evaluez o carte. Nu seamănă cu nimic din ce am citit până acum. Pe măsură ce mă apropii de final, mă consolez cu gândul că o să o iau de la capăt și că autorul mai are un volum cu un titlu și mai incitant - Trickster Makes the World.
E o lucrare academică scrisă liric, aproape poetic, despre creativitate și schimburile dintre oameni. Pare în aceeași măsură o interpretare foarte personală a istoriei omenirii, dar și o teză cât se poate de solidă, susținută de studii, volume întregi de istorie, antropologie, economie, poezie, etnografie distilate într-un alambic prețios prin filtrul creativității. Bibliografia are sute de titluri.
O să redau mai jos un fragment în care autorul decodifică basmul Cizmarul și Elfii. Toată cartea e plină de explicații și reframinguri în genul ăsta, care aruncă în aer și rearanjează eșafodajul interior al cititorului. Sună pretențios și exagerat, dar asta e și altfel nu am cum să zic.
The Gift
Lewis Hyde
The Labour of Gratitude (pag 50-55)
”There is a group of folk tales that are models of the labor of gratitude. In each of them a spirit comes to help a mortal and stays, sometimes in actual bondage, until released by the mortal's expression of gratitude.
In a tale with which we are all familiar, "The Shoemaker and the Elves”, a shoemaker is down on his luck and has only enough leather to sew a single pair of shoes. He cuts the leather out and goes to bed, planning to sew the shoes in the morning. During the night, two naked elves come and make the shoes. The shoemaker is speechless with astonishment when he finds them. Not a stitch is out of place! The shoes are such a masterpiece that the first customer to appear in the morning pays handsomely for them, and the cobbler has enough money to buy leather for two pairs of shoes. That night he cuts the leather out and goes to bed. Again in the morning the shoes are made, and again they sell for such a price as to afford the leather for four pairs of shoes. In this way the shoemaker soon prospers.
One evening ('not long before Christmas’, the tale says), the cobbler suggests to his wife that they stay up and see who has been helping them. They leave a candle burning, hide behind some coats, and, at midnight, see the elves come in and set to work. In the morning the wife says to the shoemaker, 'The little men have made us rich and we should show our gratitude for this. They're running about with nothing on and might freeze! I'm going to make them each a shirt, coat, jacket, trousers and a pair of stockings. Why don't you make them each a pair of little shoes.' The cobbler willingly agrees, and one night when the clothes are finished he lays them out on the bench in place of the leather. He and his wife hide behind the coats to watch.
The elves are surprised and pleased to find the clothes. They put them on and sing-
'We're sleek, we're fine, we're out the door,
We shan't be cobblers any more!'
And they dance around the room and away. They never return, but everything continues to go well with the shoemaker and he prospers at whatever he takes in hand.
The tale is a parable of a gifted person. It describes the time between the initial stirrings of a gift (when it is potentially ours) and the releasing of a gift (when it is actually ours). In this case the gift is the man's talent offered by the elves. The shoemaker is poor, to begin with. His own worth is not available to him for some reason that is never explained. But then while he is asleep, it begins to come. The process is always a bit mysterious. You work at a task, you work and work and still it won't come right. Then, when you're not even thinking about it, while spading the garden or stepping into the bus, the whole thing pops into your head, the missing grace is bestowed. That's the elves, the 'magic touch' by which our tasks take on life. The process does not end there, however, for the elves have need of us, as well. It is a curious detail in the story that these manikins so skilled with the needle and thread are unable to make themselves some clothes, but that seems to be the case. Their outfits and, above all, their freedom depend on the shoemaker's recognition and gratitude.(*That the helpers are in a sort of bondage is clearer in other tales with the same motif.)
My general point here is that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along. But I should qualify this. Some part of the self is able to apprehend the gift. We can feel the proffered future. I am reminded of the odd phenomenon of the 'instant cure' in psychotherapy: sometimes in a very early session a patient will experience a total lifting of his or her neurosis. For a brief period, say a week, he will experience a longed-for freedom. Then normalcy will descend, and then the years of labor to acquire that freedom as a true possession. The gift is not ours yet but the fullness of the gift is felt, and we respond with gratitude and with desire. The shoemaker in this tale is completely asleep when the first gift arrives, so we can't say he's really acquired his talent. But he does feel something being roused in him and he gets to work.
Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. The geometrical progression of exchange between shoemaker and elves reaches a sort of critical mass when the man finally decides to stay awake and watch the shop. Of course it's amusing that it takes the shoemaker so long to get around to seeing who's been helping out. We husband our gifts when we cannot do without them, or when they are not fully formed. But once his poverty has been relieved, the cobbler wonders where his riches have come from, and he and his wife stay up to see the elves; at this point say he wakes up to his gift.
What can we make of the initial nudity of the elves, the clothes they are given, and the result of that gift? To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgment, like giving it a name. By this act we begin to differentiate what was undifferentiated. Sometimes we are unable to escape from a bad mood, for example, until we have correctly articulated the feeling. Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. In this story the clothes realize the gift (that is, they make it real, make it a thing). Note that the shoemaker makes his first pair of shoes (within the tale) in order to dress the elves. It's the last act in his labor of gratitude. Now he's a changed man. Now he has worth that can be communicated. The shoes he makes are a return gift which simultaneously accomplishes his own transformation and frees the elves. This is why I say that the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or its donor. Now the man is a real shoemaker, as were the elves on the first night. (A gift isn't fully realized until it is given away, then. Those who will not acknowledge gratitude or who refuse to labor in its service neither free their gifts nor really come to possess them.)
In speaking of gratitude as a 'labor' I mean to distinguish it from 'work,' and I must digress briefly here to elaborate my distinction. Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus - these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it's harder to quantify. 'Getting the program' in AA is a labor. It is likewise apt to speak of 'mourning labor': when a loved one dies, the soul undergoes a period of travail, a change that draws energy. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms - these are labors.
Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn't do them. Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, 'I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.' That is the declaration of a laborer. Like the shoemaker, we wake up to discover the fruits of labor. And labor, because it sets its own pace, is usually accompanied by idleness, leisure, even sleep. In ancient days a seventh part of a person’s time (both Sunday and the sabbatical, the seventh year) were set aside for non-work. Nowadays when a worker or teacher gets a sabbatical, he or she may try to finish six years of unfinished chores. But first he should put his feet up and see what happens. In numerology the '7' is the number for ripening: '8’ is the number for perfection, but during the seventh period what has been accomplished by the will is left alone. It either ripens or it doesn't. It's out of our hands. One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work. Machines don't need a Sunday. Early mill hands found themselves working a seven-day week, and had to fight for years to get back the Sabbath.
When I speak of labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work. The labor of gratitude is the middle term in the passage of a gift. It is wholly different from the 'obligation' we feel when we accept something we don't really want. (An obligation may be discharged by an act of will.) A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also, therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step in AA gives away what was received; the man wanted to teach so as to 'pass it on to the younger men' gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.
(It may be clearer now why I said above that a fee for service tends to cut off the force of gratitude. The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled upon ahead of time. We can't predict the fruits of our labor; we can't even know if we'll really go through with it. Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can't be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and de-potentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state. There's no way to pay for a higher state unless you're in it! The labor must precede. In the hospital where I worked we would ask people if they wanted to get sober, but that was only after someone had asked them if they could afford a week in the hospital. AA only asks if you want to get sober.)
As a parable of a gifted person, 'The Shoemaker and the Elves' is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night - a talent has appeared, but it's naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. 'I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.' He was twenty. 'In March, 1876, I broke loose,' he says. He left family, friends, business and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life – and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:
Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is in an a not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
The task of setting free one's gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person's tutelar spirit his genius. In Greece it was called a daemon. Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a daemon who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed. Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass, wrote a treatise on the daemon/genius, and one of the things he says is that in Rome it was the custom on one's birthday to offer a sacrifice to one's own genius. A man didn't just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this way the genius made one 'genial' - sexually potent, artistically creative and spiritually fertile.
According to Apuleius, if a man cultivated his genius through such sacrifice, it would become a lar, a protective household god, when he died. But if a man ignored his genius, it became a larva or a lemur when he died, a troublesome, restless spook that preys on the living. The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit that brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die.
An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. There his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change. An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or daemon is an age of narcissism. The 'cult of genius' which we have seen in this century has nothing to do with the ancient cult. The public adoration of genius turns men and women into celebrities and cuts off all commerce with the guardian spirits. We should not speak of another's genius; this is a private affair. The celebrity trades on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them. And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free. In an age of narcissism the centers of culture are populated with larvae and lemures, the spooks of unfulfilled genii.„
Mulțumesc celor care au intrat în dialog cu mine la Check-In. Aștept și alte confesiuni:
Hasta la Proxima!
Lauralia